Stories

In 1983, with mechanical watches nearly gone, the master watchmaker Gerd-Rüdiger Lang started Chronoswiss in Munich with a garage full of parts and a belief in traditional watchmaking.

Casio designer Kikuo Ibe wanted a watch that would not break when dropped, and after about two years of prototypes found his answer in a children’s rubber ball.

Raketa’s watches come from a factory in Peterhof that Peter the Great founded in 1721 to cut stone, and that now makes every part of its own movements.

François Czapek, a Polish emigrant, founded his Geneva house in 1845; in 2015 three entrepreneurs, with watch lovers as shareholders, brought the name back.

Born in Neuchâtel in 2004 and named with an anagram of the town, Hautlence makes watches that often swap ordinary hands for chains, spheres and jumping numerals.

URWERK began at a student party in December 1995, where the watchmaker Felix Baumgartner, his brother Thomas and the designer Martin Frei talked about how best to express time.

Bart and Tim, the brothers behind Grönefeld, make complicated watches next to the Saint Plechelmus Basilica in Oldenzaal, where their grandfather opened his workshop in 1912.

From the Jura village of Le Noirmont, Louis Erard, independent since 1929, has turned one complication, the regulator, into a canvas for guest designers and watchmakers.

Founded in 1839, L’Epée 1839 is a clock manufacture in Delémont, in the Swiss Jura, and since 2014 it has engineered and built a series of clocks conceived by MB&F.

In 2005 Maximilian Büsser resigned from Harry Winston to found MB&F, a company that treats a watch as a machine and makes each one with friends.

Two childhood friends, a watch enthusiast and a master watchmaker, opened a manufacture in Biel/Bienne in 2009 to make movements that show how they work.

Heinrich Moser founded H. Moser & Cie. in 1828; since its revival in 2005, the house has hidden complex watchmaking behind deliberately plain dials.